As Stanford University communications professor Howard Rheingold notes, “Up until now, ‘technology’ has been an authority delivering the lecture which [students] memorized. If there is discussion, it’s mostly about performing for the teacher. Is it possible to make that more of a peer-to-peer activity? Blogs and forums and wikis enable that. So a lot of this is not new, but it’s easier to do [and] the barriers to participation are lower now.”

Alan Daly, at the University of California at San Diego, . . . believes education “is moving away from large-scale prescriptive approaches to more individualized, tailored, differentiated approaches.”

The study looks at how schools are using new technologies to help students learn.

College students are becoming “free-range learners,” concludes a new study by Glenda Morgan, an e-learning specialist at the University of Illinois. Using informal networks, students told her they “shop around for digital texts and videos” that haven’t been assigned in class. They mentioned videos from elite universities such as Stanford and MIT; pre-meds favored the Mayo Clinic.